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Bio

Yanzhong Huang is senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he directs the Global Health Governance roundtable. He is also professor and director of global health studies at Seton Hall University's School of Diplomacy and International Relations, where he developed the first academic concentration among U.S. professional schools of international affairs that explicitly addresses the security and foreign policy aspects of health issues. He is the founding editor of Global Health Governance: The Scholarly Journal for the New Health Security Paradigm.

Huang has written extensively on global health governance, health diplomacy and health security, and public health in China and East Asia. He has published numerous reports, journal articles, and book chapters, including articles in Survival, Foreign Affairs, Public Health,Bioterrorism and Biosecurity, and the Journal of Contemporary China, as well as op-ed pieces in the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, YaleGlobal, and South China Morning Post, among others. In 2006, he coauthored the first scholarly article that systematically examined China's soft power. His book Governing Health in Contemporary Chinalooks at health-care reform, government ability to address disease outbreaks, and food and drug safety in China.

He is often consulted by major media outlets, the private sector, and governmental and nongovernmental organizations on global health issues and China. He has also been frequently invited to speak at leading academic institutions and think tanks. In 2012, he was listed by InsideJersey as one of the "20 Brainiest People in New Jersey." He was a research associate at the National Asia Research Program, a public intellectuals fellow at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, an associate fellow at the Asia Society, a visiting senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore, and a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has taught at Barnard College and Columbia University. He obtained his BA and MA degrees from Fudan University and his PhD degree from the University of Chicago.

Languages:

Chinese

Emerging Powers and the Future of Global Health Governance

The past three decades have seen the rise of various global health challenges, including dangerous pathogens and non-communicable diseases. Efforts to address these challenges have led to the proliferation of new global health players, processes, and institutions. Meanwhile, the vast rebalancing of wealth across the globe has led to the growing expectation that emerging powers, represented by the so-called BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), can and should play a greater role in global health governance. However, these countries themselves face mounting challenges in bringing adequate and accessible healthcare to their own populations. Building on my study on China's public health and healthcare, I explore the emerging powers' health system capacities, including their abilities to handle communicable and non-communicable disease challenges and their efforts to reform the health sector. I also examine the emerging powers' participation in global health, including in global health institutions such as the World Health Organization, the provision of health-related development assistance, and the potential to become a game changer in global access to medicine.

This project is made possible through the support of the Robina Foundation.

China's Environmental Health Crisis

China is on the cusp of becoming the world's largest economy. Yet China's unfettered economic growth has imposed tremendous social costs. Topping this list is extensive air pollution, water pollution, and soil contamination. Outdoor air pollution, for example, has been linked to 1.2 million premature deaths in China. The result has been an environmental health crisis that is threatening social stability and challenging the leadership's political legitimacy. What is the response of the Chinese state to its environmental health crisis and is this response sufficient to the challenges at hand? A study of the politics of China's environmental health crisis would provide critical insights into the issue of political development in China. Meanwhile, the manner in which China handles its environmental health crisis, and the success or failure of its methods, could have important implications for U.S. domestic and foreign policy. My work on these issues assesses China's policy response to the crisis, its domestic and foreign policy implications, as well as the potential for international cooperation over environmental health.

This project is made possible through the support of the Smith Richardson Foundation.

Addressing the Last Mile Issues of Universal Health Coverage

The United Nations (UN) is currently creating a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which will build upon the Millennium Development Goals that is to expire at the end of 2015. Among the seventeen SDGs, Goal Three focuses on health: “Ensuring healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.” While advocates are jockeying for the inclusion of a number of specific health targets in SDG Goal Three, achieving Universal Health Coverage (UHC) leads the list of potential sub-goals. Indeed, because progress toward UHC seeks to ensure affordable and quality healthcare for everyone, it is considered central to reaching the SDG goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030. In order for the negotiations to move forward in a constructive and efficient manner, it is imperative that the involved parties gain a clear understanding of the critical issues surrounding the UHC concept. Co-directed by me and my colleague Laurie Garrett, the Project on Addressing the Last Mile Issues of Universal Health Coverage will hold three roundtable meetings and produce several briefing papers to address pertinent issues related to UHC as they are brought up in UN meetings. Two roundtable meetings have been held in New York, with the first focusing on the cost of providing UHC and the second on the role of human resources in implementing UHC.

This project is made possible through the support of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Featured Publications

As the world economy and international security are increasingly vulnerable to major disease outbreaks in China, Governing Health in Contemporary China sheds critical light on China's role in global health governance.

Yanzhong Huang argues that in their single-minded pursuit of economic growth, China's leaders have long overlooked public health--which, by some measures, is now worse than under Mao. Despite recent reforms, China's citizens keep getting sicker, threatening the country's health-care system, the economy at large, and even the stability of the regime.

All Publications

In testimony before the United States-China Economic and Security Commission on April 27, 2016, Yanzhong Huang discussed China’s 13th Five Year Plan in the context of China’s healthcare system landscape, attempts at reform, and potential opportunities and challenges for collaboration between the United States and China in the healthcare sector.

China is developing new tools to address its pressing environmental pollution, but these efforts are likely to be muted until fundamental changes are made to the country’s policy structure, writes CFR's Yanzhong Huang.

This article, published in Duke University’s Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, examines the role of international institutional actors in China’s health policy process. Particular attention is paid to three major international institutional actors: the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and the Global Fund to Fight AID, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

This study explores the role of domestic politics in China’s health-related development assistance to Africa. It identifies domestic politics as a constant, even critical, component in shaping and structuring China’s health aid to Africa.

Yanzhong Huang notes the limited public health infrastructure in certain West African countries that are currently battling the spread of Ebola, which is a similar phenomenon to that which occurred in China during the 2003 SARS outbreak. Dr. Huang stresses the importance of foreign aid, particularly Chinese funds, to slow the spread of Ebola but points out that dependence on foreign aid is ultimately an unsustainable public health strategy.

Yanzhong Huang argues that the BRICs grouping of countries, which makes sense in the coordination of global macroeconomic policy, cannot be assumed to be relevant in the development of any global health policy.

An effective strategy to engage China's health-care sector requires the U.S. government to continue promoting business opportunities for U.S. biopharmaceutical firms, hospital groups, and insurance companies, CFR Senior Fellow for Global Health Yanzhong Huang tells the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. In the meantime, it is also important for the U.S. government and companies to demonstrate the willingness to work with China in addressing health issues of their immediate concern.

Yanzhong Huang, Patricia Moser, and Susann Roth discuss the key health challenges in the post-2015 development agenda for Asia and the Pacific, a highly populated, diverse region of countries with different health needs and priorities.

Events

The goal of the series is to examine the changing landscape of global health governance in the context of emerging powers, empowered non-governmental actors, and shifting health priorities. A number of questions will be discussed, including: What effect will the growing burden of noncommunicable diseases have on the economic growth of India and China? Can the WHO maintain a central role in global health governance, with competition from other actors (e.g., World Bank, WTO, MNCs, Gates Foundation) and the proliferation of new initiatives not housed by WHO (e.g., Global Fund)? How will the emerging powers (e.g., China, India, Brazil) and the rising nonstate actors affect the international community's ability to set priorities and define the upper limits of acceptable action? How does the entrance of health into the realm of "high politics" affect our way of handling transnational health threats?

Four roundtables will take place throughout the winter and spring in New York and Washington, DC.

This roundtable series is sponsored by the International Institutions and Global Governance program and made possible by the generous support of the Robina Foundation.

CFR Events

Symposium

The Future of China

PanelistsLeon Berkelmans

Director of the International Economy Program and the G20 Studies Centre, Lowy Institute for International Policy

Yanzhong Huang is interviewed by Morgan Winsor at the International Business Times about how Chinese government suspension of the one-child policy will take decades to relieve economic pressures of their aging population.

Yanzhong Huang was quoted on Vox from an article he had previously written for the Diplomat about the aging population in China in order to analyze the reasoning behind China's lifting of its one-child policy.

Yanzhong Huang spoke on a panel at the Booth School at the University of Chicago on how to encourage blockbuster biomedical breakthroughs reach the market and ensure that a consensus emerges on how to provide optimal value for money for investments in healthcare IT infrastructure.

As part of a panel discussion at Bridges China Dialogue 2012, Yanzhong Huang answers what are the implications of the emerging importance of China as the major global player in the fields of trade, finance, health and labor.

Yanzhong Huang was quoted by the Associated Press about public discontent with China's health care system and specifically a upturn in violent attacks by patients. This article was reprinted by the Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek, Straits Times, ABC News, and many other news outlets.

CSIS Global Health Policy Center hosted this half-day conference in which Yanzhong Huang discusses the involvement of the BRICS in global health activities. He suggested that some of the BRICS, such as China, engage in global health policy and programmatic efforts to demonstrate that they are responsible international stakeholders, able and willing to respect international rules and adopt a normative multilateral approach to global health governance.